Star Facts
  • Category Recording

    Address 7057 Hollywood Blvd.

    Ceremony date 10/20/1995

About
Dizzy Gillespie
Born:
1917-10-21,
Cheraw,
South Carolina,
USA
Education:
NA
Ethnicity:
African American
Death Date:
-0001-11-30
Addition Websites

Dizzy Gillespie

John BirksDizzyGillespie was an American jazz trumpet player, bandleader, singer, and composer.

Together with Charlie Parker, he was a major figure in the development of bebop and modern jazz. He taught and influenced many other musicians, including trumpeters Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, Clifford Brown, Arturo Sandoval, Lee Morgan, Jon Faddis and Chuck Mangione.

?Dizzy Gillespie’s contributions to jazz were huge. Arguably Gillespie is remembered, by both critics and fans alike, as one of the greatest jazz trumpeters of all time. Gillespie was such a complex player that his contemporaries ended up copying Miles Davis and Fats Navarro instead, and it was not until Jon Faddis’s emergence in the 1970s that Dizzy’s style was successfully recreated.?

In addition to featuring in the epochal moments in bebop, he was instrumental in founding Afro-Cuban jazz, the modern jazz version of what early-jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton referred to as the “Spanish Tinge”. Gillespie was a trumpet virtuoso and gifted improviser, building on the virtuoso style of Roy Eldridge but adding layers of harmonic complexity previously unknown in jazz. Dizzy’s beret and horn-rimmed spectacles, his scat singing, his bent horn, pouched cheeks and his light-hearted personality were essential in popularizing bebop.

amzn_assoc_placement = "adunit0";amzn_assoc_search_bar = "true";amzn_assoc_tracking_id = "wof04-20";amzn_assoc_search_bar_position = "bottom";amzn_assoc_ad_mode = "search";amzn_assoc_ad_type = "smart";amzn_assoc_marketplace = "amazon";amzn_assoc_region = "US";amzn_assoc_title = "Shop Dizzy Gillespie";amzn_assoc_default_search_phrase = "Dizzy Gillespie";amzn_assoc_default_category = "All";amzn_assoc_linkid = "36be25d6dbe955d2063dab440a295edb";